"The strangest and most
fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship
them."

P.D. Ouspensky

"I suspect that our faith in
psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents’
belief in phrenology seems to us now."

Gore Vidal

Reflections on a sinking ship

"I imagine a far finer and
more comprehensive task for (psychoanalysis) than alliance with an ethical
fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many
centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so
gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he
was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity
for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once
were-a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an
animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion."

C.G. Jung (in a letter to Freud)

"Freud and his followers
frequently suggested that all religion was a mass delusion, a communal neurosis,
or even a shared psychosis.....Of course, Freud's circle consisted of
well-educated, highly secular persons who prided themselves on their scientific
attitudes. But we suggest that the main reason for this hostility to
conventional religion was the fact that Psychoanalysis itself was a client cult,
struggling to establish itself at the very border of religion. Surely, it
offered a package of compensators, some of which were very general, totally
outside the prevailing Christian culture. In attacking conventional religions,
Psychoanalysis explicitly sought to replace them. For many of Freud's followers,
indeed, for an embarrassingly prominent set of his most famous disciples,
Psychoanalysis did develop into a religious cult."

Stark & William Sims Bainbridge

The Future of Religion

"....Freudian psychoanalysis
and all breakaway forms developed by his dissenting disciples (Jung, Adler,
Reich, Burrow, Horney, and others) has become more like a schismatic religion
than anything else. Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis are divided and mutually
hostile as Ultra-Orthodox and Reconstructionist Jews, Catholic and Protestant
Christians, or Sunni and Shi'ite Moslems. You don't need to be a medical doctor
to be a psychoanalyst; you do need to cleave -at all costs-to a particular
doctrine."

Lou Marinoff, Ph.D.

Plato Not Prozac: Applying
Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems

"My difficulties were surely
personal, but I could not help suspecting that psychoanalysis was a form of
alienation that was being used as a substitute not only for Marxism but for
social activism of any kind. New York, that riverbed through which so many
subterranean cultures are always flowing, was swollen with rivulets of
dispossessed liberals and leftists in chaotic flight from the bombarded old
castle of self-denial, with its infinite confidence in social progress and its
authentification-through-political-correctness of their positions at the leading
edge of history. As always, the American self, a puritanical item, needed a
scheme of morals to administer, and once Marx's was declared beyond the pale,
Freud's offered a similar smugness of the saved. Only this time the challenge
handed the lost ones like was not to join a picket line or a Spanish brigade but
to confess to having been a selfish bastard who had never known how to
love."

Arthur Miller

"In practice, psychoanalysis
has by now become all too often nor more than psychic blood-letting. The patient
is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is
encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analysts' nonresponsive
reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution, a
"tranquilizing' of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient
is indeed not so much altered as worn out-less bad, less good, less bright, less
willful, less destructive, less creative."

-Norman Mailer

"We do not like to look at the
shadow side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized
society who have lost their shadow altogether, have lost the third dimension,
and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend
because it produces things we do not like....Sometimes it forms the skeleton in
the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing."

-Carl G. Jung

"As for psychoanalysis, it’s
neither more nor less than blackmail."

Ezra Pound

"Psychoanalysis is that
spiritual disease of which it considers itself to be the cure."

Karl Kraus

"The relation between
psychiatrists and other kinds of lunatics is more or less the relation of convex
folly to a concave one."

Karl Kraus

"The greatest discovery of my
generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of
mind."

-William James (1842-1910)

"Let the credulous and the
vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily
application of old Greek myths to their private parts."

Vladimir Nabakov

""It is customary in
these days of psychoanalysis to assume that, when any young person is out of
harmony with his environment, the cause must lie in some psychological disorder.
This is to my mind a complete mistake."

Bertrand Russell

"The task of
psychotherapy is to help the person achieve, through a special relationship with
a therapist, good communication with himself. Once this is achieved, he can
communicate more freely and more effectively with others. We may say then that
psychotherapy is good communication, within and between men. We may also turn
that statement around it will still be true. Good communication, free
communication, within or between men is always therapeutic."

Carl Ransom Rogers

"Work and love-these are the
basics. Without them there is neurosis."

Theodore Reik

"courage in war has been
recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a great part of the
training of boys and young men have been devoted to producing a type of
character capable of fearlessness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual
courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique.
Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you find this quite as
useful as the Boy Scout’s daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that life
would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are,
immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and intelligence. Exercise
of this sort prolonged through several years will at last enable you to admit
facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear
over a very large field."

Bertrand Russell

"Always this same morbid
interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen,
always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities,
personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of
other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy
presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses.
Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, pre-suppose a whole
world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing
up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at
last, as human psychology."

-D.H. Lawrence

"One can safely predict that
techniques for controlling and modifying personality will grow more efficient by
the year 2000 . Thousands of experts at conditioning are now trying out their behavior-changing technology on tens of thousands of people-in classrooms,
prisons, mental hospitals, day-care centers, factories, nursing homes….."

Journal of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences (Summer 1967)

Presumably, research will continue
to increase the effectiveness of psychological techniques for controlling human
behavior. But we think that psychological technique, alone will be sufficient to
adjust human beings to the kind of society that technology is creating."

Unabomber’s Manifesto

"As I studied the practical
impact of psychotherapy. I reached a startling conclusion. Exactly one-third of
the psychiatrist’s patients were getting better, one-third of them were
getting worse, and one-third of them were staying the same. You can probably
find better results now from "Kenny Kingston’s psychic Hotline." And
everybody knows it."

Timothy Leary

"The whole psychology of
modern disquiet is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

"Wherever an inferiority
complex exists, there is a good reason for it. There is always something
inferior there, although not just where we persuade ourselves that it is."

-Carl Jung

"the confusion and barrenness
of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its
state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings….for
in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion….the
existence of experimental methods makes us think we have the means of solving
the problems which trouble us; though problems and methods pass one another
by."

Ludwig Wittgentstein

Philosophical Investigations

"Institutional psychiatry is a
continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary
and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations
of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science.
The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a
pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and
rationality.:-"

-Thomas Szasz

The Manufacture of Madness

"On some shining tomorrow a
psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a
compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting
the lampposts along the highway."

H.L. Mencken

"The fact is psychology has
much to answer for. Pre-frontal lobotomies, shock therapy, the Neuro-Linguistic
Institute in its various forms, Esalen, est. techniques for manipulating people
in a wide variety of areas, such as developing methods for selling inferior
products to foolish consumers."

killing the spirit

"A large part of the
popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated
spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of
"spirit" over matter."

-Susan Sontag

"Analysis brings no curative powers
in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which,
oddly enough, is consciousness."

-Henry Miller

The Cosmological Eye "An Open
Letter to Surrealists Everywhere"

"The eagerness to
brand certain behaviors as signs of dysfunctional neuroses rather than signs of
personality traits or even of philosophical outlooks-and then to alter those
behaviors by redesigning brain chemistry with psychoactive drugs-has become so
common that it now invites editorializing and even parody. A commentary on a
Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman subtitled
"Get That Man Some Prozac" quoted two psychiatrists diagnosing the
tragic hero, Willy Loman, as manic-depressive with hallucinatory aspects.
Margaret Talbot, writing for The New York Times Magazine, took a
jaundiced look at what she called "the latest trait to become a
pathology": shyness syndrome. Shyness, renamed social anxiety disorder or
social phobia, can now be "treated" by Paxil, an antidepressant.

Even Winnie-the-Pooh
and his quirky fellow inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood have not escaped the
medicalization of personality. A group of pediatricians wrote a parody of a
scientific paper, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
diagnosing Pooh, Piglet, and the rest of Christopher Robin's crowd with DSM-IV
standards. Their conclusions: Pooh has attention deficit disorder (OCD) as well,
and is a candidate for methylphenidate (brand name, Ritalin, a central nervous
system stimulant often prescribed for ADHD). Piglet's generalized anxiety
disorder would respond to paroxetine (the generic name for Paxil, which counters
not only depression but anxiety, panic attacks, and social phobias as well), and
the chronically, though mildly, depressed Eeyore would probably benefit from
fluoxetine (known, the world over as Prozac). Tigger, with his hyperactivity and
impulsivity, needs a stimulant medication. perhaps combined with clondine
(prescribed for high blood pressure and Tourette's syndrome). To judge from the
letters to the editor received by and later published in the journal, many
readers did not get the joke."

Michelle Stacey

The Fasting Girl

********************************

Book: "Of Two Minds: The
growing disorder in American Psychiatry" by T.M. Luhrimann

Book: "The Aryan Christ: The
Secret Life of Carl Jung

Book: "In the Freud
Archives" by Janet Malcolm

Book: "Compassion and
Self-hate: An Alternative to Despair" by Theodore Isaac Rubin M.D.